SPAMer Comments

It’s hard work running a Web site. One of the things I have to do from time to time is check that I am not getting SPAM’ed by fake comments. The business that hosts my site, SquareSpace, run their own filters to try and stop the vast bulk of commenter’s posting SPAM comments for all of the people who use their hosting services, as do all the major blog and site hosting businesses—but sometimes a few get through.

Sometimes it is not that easy to spot SPAM comments.

Just recently, on the 19th of January, I had the following comment posted to my posting titled “Any Ideas for Stuff to Post” (here).

Hello. I love this forum,very greate.Do you love it ? I will come here again and again.
The interesting name of a site - www.abalook.com, interesting this here is very good.
I spent 8 hours searching in the network, until find your forum!

“How nice”, I thought. Could be by a French person having a little trouble with the complexities of English.

But then I sort of studied the e-mail address of the person posting. If someone puts in an e-mail address I can see it from the management console view although you cannot see it from the public view. I won’t put in the full e-mail address but the domain component, being the bit after the @ symbol, was “yslonsale.com”.

From my first quick glance this looked okay, but then I saw that it says “ysl on sale”. So I Google’d it, and sure enough it is a known SPAM comment source.

There are pages of SPAM listed on the Stop Spam Forum site for the domain “yslonsale” including the ‘person’ who commented on my post.

So now I have to delete it after first thinking it was a nice new comment.